There is considerable interest in identifying and/or measuring the receipt of, and or exposure to, audio data by an audience in order to provide market information to advertisers, media distributors, and the like, to verify airing, to calculate royalties, to detect piracy, and for any other purposes for which an estimation of audience receipt or exposure is desired. Additionally, there is a considerable interest in providing content and/or performing actions on devices based on media exposure detection. The emergence of multiple, overlapping media distribution pathways, as well as the wide variety of available user systems (e.g. PC's, PDA's, portable CD players, Internet, appliances, TV, radio, etc.) for receiving audio data and other types of data, has greatly complicated the task of measuring audience receipt of, and exposure to, individual program segments. The development of commercially viable techniques for encoding audio data with program identification data provides a crucial tool for measuring audio data receipt and exposure across multiple media distribution pathways and user systems.
Recently, advances have been made in creating universal media codes, commonly known as “trackable asset cross-platform identification,” (or TAXI) in order to track media assets such as videos, music, advertisements, etc. across multiple platforms. Currently, the Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement (CIMM) is developing TAXI to establish open and interoperable standards upon which incumbent business applications and supporting operational processes can more effectively adapt to the requirements of asset tracking. By utilizing a standardized (universal) cross-platform asset identification techniques, systems may be enabled to simplify a variety of business, technical and operational challenges. Briefly, TAXI is configured to identify entertainment and advertising assets across distribution platforms and establish standards for multi-channel asset tracking. It acts as a UPC code for all audio/video programming and advertising assets, and is based on the entertainment identifier registry (EIDR) and/or Ad-ID formats, among others. It operates to establish cross-sector protocols for video asset registration, ID flow-through and transaction measurement and reporting and may be a foundation layer for many critical content and advertising applications.
One of the issues with standardized cross-platform asset identification technologies is that non-audio identification formats are not easily transposed into audio formats. For example, ID's for media content may contain a code that is non-acoustically encoded as metadata into the content before transmission, broadcast, multicast, etc. One exemplary code, used under the Entertainment Identifier Registry (EIDR) format (http://eidr.org/), utilizes an EMA metadata structure to provide data fields in communicating descriptive, logical, and technical metadata regarding media from content providers. In certain cases, metadata includes elements that cover typical definitions of media, particularly movies and television, and may have two parts, namely, basic metadata and digital asset metadata. Basic metadata includes descriptions such as title and artists. It describes information about the work independent of encoding. Digital Asset metadata describes information about individual encoded audio, video and subtitle streams, and other media included. Package and File Metadata describes a single possible packaging scenario and ties in other metadata types, such as ratings and parental control information. Other types of metadata, such as “common metadata,” are designed to provide definitions to be inserted into other metadata systems, such as EIDR metadata and UltraViolet metadata. Downstream users may then define additional metadata to cover areas not included in common metadata.
While such metadata is readily detectable via data connection, it may not be detectible, or may not even exist, in the audio itself. Accordingly, there is a need to provide universal identification codes in audio. Furthermore, as universal identification codes are generally capable of carrying more information than standard audio codes, it would be advantageous to have an encoding system capable of carrying such codes in audio. Such configurations would allow the transposition of non-audio universal codes into audio formats and provide more robust information for audience measurement purposes.